This year’s American Library Association Annual Conference will be held June 27 – July 2 in San Diego, CA, where Pacific Ocean breezes and dry air will likely keep daytime temperatures in the low ’70s and nights 10 degrees cooler. Add in the San Diego Convention Center’s bayfront setting and nearby attractions that include Balboa Park, home to the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Museum of Art, and Mission Beach a 15-minute car trip away, and this year’s Annual is one to look forward to.
The U.S. Book Show, presented by Publishers Weekly—this year in collaboration with the Association of American Literary Agents—held its fourth annual event on May 22. The conference, which launched as a virtual symposium in 2021 to replace the defunct BookExpo America, offered a day of industry-centered conversation for publishing professionals, agents, editors, marketers, and authors.
By all accounts the 2024 Public Library Association (PLA) conference, held April 3–5 in Columbus, OH, was a resounding success. The 7,573 participants—including 5,702 attendees, 1,518 exhibitors, and 353 virtual registrants—packed the show floor, programs, and speaker sessions with palpable enthusiasm.
At the 2024 Public Library Association (PLA) conference, held April 3–5 in Columbus, OH, presentations were notably targeted and useful. And, as a number bore out, those concerns overlap in many areas.
Michael Reynolds, editor-in-chief of Europa Editions, saw libraries and publishers as star-crossed lovers that have been kept far apart for as long as possible, finally meeting in one room in Columbus, OH, at IndieLib, a conference hosted by the Independent Publishers Caucus and the Digital Public Library of America on April 2.
Large library gatherings usually share city space with at least one other special interest group—who could forget the young dancers shivering in their spangled leotards during January’s LibLearnX Conference in sub-zero Baltimore? This year, those attending the Public Library Association (PLA) biennial conference, held April 3–5 in Columbus, OH, will be overlapping with a crowd of umbraphiles—eclipse chasers—getting a jump on the first visible total solar eclipse in the United States since 2017, occurring April 8. Columbus lies just south of the path of totality.
Artificial intelligence (AI) was a hot topic at this year’s American Library Association LibLearnX conference in Baltimore, January 19–22, with multiple presentations, panels, and workshops covering the technology and its impact on libraries and the people they serve, touching on both AI’s potential and its current flaws.
Many of the topics that came up at the 2024 American Library Association LibLearnX conference, held in Baltimore January 19–22, were not surprising to anyone following library issues. People talked about the ongoing and increasing number of book challenges and how to handle them, the opportunities and challenges presented by artificial intelligence, and how to diversify a field whose demographics remain stubbornly flat, to name a few. One subject also on everyone’s mind, however, was the size of the show.
How do library leaders find the support needed to steward their organizations through challenging times? LJ's 2023 Directors' Summit asked—and answered—some big questions.
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